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Who ever advanced a truer and grander philosophy of disappointments than he has given us? They are intended to impress the German maxim that "the good is the enemy of the best." Artists must be satisfied with nothing short of their best work, never allowing talent to crowd genius aside. "Disappointments are as rough weather that seasons timber." His confidence in the high quality of his own productions is refreshing. He says:

It is of little consequence whether I fail; the I in the matter is a small business. "Que mon nom soit flètri qua la France soit libre!" quoth Danton. Which is to say, interpreted by my environment: "Let my name perish; the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it."

That which captivates us in Sidney Lanier is his unflinching fidelity to worthy ideals. These he will follow, no matter through what pain and sorrow they may lead. He is an optimist of the most approved type, having an unconquerable faith in the best things and in the ultimate triumph of the best persons. To his clear vision God is God-the greatest Being conceivable-who is unerringly accomplishing his own eternal plans. In his lofty, exhilarating, and triumphant optimism he is very like Robert Browning, being equally sure that

God's in his heaven:

All's right with the world

in so far as Jehovah's supreme purposes are concerned. Not one pessimistic note is struck in all the music of his life. Desert without, oasis within. Bleak winter without, tranquil summer within. In his desk was found a note on Hamlet which reveals a buoyant faith that even transfigures death. He says: "The grave scene is the most immense conception of all tragedy to me. How bleak it is! It is only skulls and regret; there is no comfort in it. But death, my God! it is the sweetest and dearest of all the angels to him who understands." True, Lanier, it is just this to everyone who sees it, as thou dost, from the Christ point of view. He “turneth the shadow of death into the morning." Our keen-sighted poet relished life and life's grand mission. He also estimated death at its real value. His optimism is grounded on his unshaken confidence in that personal Power in the world which

"works for righteousness." There is a fixed moral order in the universe. Conformity thereto puts melody into life. Duty's voice is always rich with jubilant harmonies. Read his "Song of the Chattahoochee," one of the most musical and stimulating of all "Stream Songs." It personifies the river bravely resisting all allurements and fascinations of mountain, forest, and plain, grass, ferns, and flowers. With united voice they all cry, "Abide here with us in restful ease." Listen to its chivalric answer:

But O, not the hills of Habersham,

And O, not the valleys of Hall

Avail: I am fain for to water the plain.
Downward the voices of Duty call-

Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main;
The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn,
And a myriad flowers mortally yearn,

And the lordly main from beyond the plain
Calls over the hills of Habersham,

Calls through the valleys of Hall.

Lanier's sublime devotion to loftiest ethical ideals may be heard and felt also in his lectures on "The Development of Personality" already mentioned. He boldly antagonizes the cry of radical æsthetics, that art is alone for art's sake, that it must have no moral purpose. His teachings on this subject are as austere in their exactions as any found in Milton, Ruskin, or the Hebrew prophets of righteousness. What regal majesty in these utterances, addressed to a body of students:

Permit me to recall to you, in the first place, that the requirement has been from time immemorial that wherever there is contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet, if the lip have a certain fullness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor, unless he be portraying moral ugliness for a moral purpose, may as well give over his marble for paving stones. Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work.

One who has a genius for powerful portrayal, as well as for nicest ethical discrimination, is here speaking. How sublime this truth and how forcibly stated! The judgments of time are "inexorably moral." Lanier continues, magnificently:

For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty; that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him—he is not yet the great artist.

That Mr. Lanier has risen to the sun-cheered summits of Cousin's fine philosophy of "the true, the beautiful, and the good," is evident in the following:

Is it not clear that . . . truth, beauty, wisdom, goodness, love appear as if they were but avatars of one and the same essential God? And, if this be true, cannot one say with authority to the young artist, whether working in stone, in color, in tones, or in character-forms of the novel, "So far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused-soul and body, one might say-with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love-that is, the love of all things in their proper relation—unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; unless you are suffused with beauty, do not dare to meddle with love; unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness; in a word, unless you are suffused with beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness, and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist."

Lanier's utterances upon the high mission of art impress us as being filled with "sweetness and light," with crystalline purity and spiritual vitality. The writer knows of nothing in literature more exacting and elevated. They will be sustenance and inspiration for aspiring souls in all coming ages. In the same realm Professor Henry Jones affirms, "No artist can portray filth for filth's sake and remain an artist." And Hegel teaches that "the devil himself is a bad æsthetic figure, with which art has nothing to do, for he is deceit itself, and thus a personage highly prosaic." God is the perfection of beauty. It is truly reassuring to find masters who insist upon art being as sternly opposed to evil as is pure religion. Character achieved under the guidance of the one perfect Mar is to be the supreme essential of success in every field of human activity. This is an inference from Mr. Lanier's theory of life. A leading excellence is his remarkable freedom from error in his scientific, philosophic, æsthetic, ethical, and spiritual con

ceptions. He seems to have caught the secret of living loftily yet practically, of living upon all available strength instead of weakness, which is the fatal blunder of many.

Lanier's great heart ever throbbed in strongest sympathy with nature, which is bright, fragrant, joyous with the felt presence of a loving, personal God. The outward reach and upward flight of his soul are grandly expressed in his "imaginative organ-chant," "The Marshes of Glynn:"

O what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free

From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,

By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of stain.

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies

In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the earth and the skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod

I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God.

Other poets have been moved by the vast and sublime in the natural world to poetic expression. But Lanier experienced the divine presence everywhere. The warm throbbing of God's heart is felt in every atom, and its music is heard in every sound that falls from the sky and rises out of the earth. The common things of field and forest are full of beauty, suggestive of truth, goodness, and love. "Corn," "Clover," "From the Flats," "Tampa Robins," "The Bee," "The Dove," are poems illustrating his vision of the lofty in the lowly and his power of transfiguring the commonplace into celestial splendor. Lanier inherited an intensely religious nature; not narrow, not bigoted, not sectarian or conventional, but essentially and genuinely reverent, devout, loyal. He was in love with God and all of God's works and plans. What a tranquil spirit of worship is found in "A Florida Sunday:"

Long lissome coast that in and outward swerves,
The grace of God made manifest in curves-
All riches, goods, and braveries never told.

Of earth, sun, air, and heaven-now I hold
Your being in my being: I am ye,

And ye, myself: yea, lastly, Thee,

God, whom my roads all reach, however they run,
My Father, Friend, Beloved, dear All-One,

Thee in my soul, my soul in Thee, I feel,

Self of myself.

Pantheism? Yes, blessed personal, Christian pantheism as he further affirms:

Thou, Father, without logic, tellest me
How this divine denial true may be,
How All's in each, yet every one of all

Maintains his self complete and several.

Personality is Lanier's one supremely precious truth, in whose light all else must be interpreted. And yet his sense of kinship with all created things is a source of comfort and strength to him. It is this deep love of nature that brings him into such perfect sympathy with Christ under the shadows of Gethsemane. Like Jesus, who loved solitude, often seeking the quiet grove and mountain-side retreat, Lanier frequently fled "from men's ungodly quarrel about God." He says: "I fled in tears to the woods and laid me down on the earth. Then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground; and I looked, and my cheek lay close to a violet. Then my heart took courage and I said, 'I know that thou art the word of my God, little violet."" How natural for one having this experience to write exquisitely the tender "Ballad of Trees and the Master." Is not this poem nature's witness to Christ, as "The Crystal" is history's testimony to his unapproachable superiority?

After calling up many of the most illustrious governor-spirits of the past-the wisest seers and sweetest singers of every age and clime-and finding in every one some imperfection, Lanier then turns exultingly to Christ:

But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time,
But Thee, O poet's Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,

!

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